One of the old mantras for API design is “Make doing the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard”. This, of course, applies to much broader topics as well, such as software development or UX.
For software development specifically, are we maybe making “doing the wrong thing” too easy as well? Here are a two examples:
Web Requests
In the old times, requesting data from a web server required first setting up the request, sending it, and then getting the result back to your application either via polling or callbacks. Dave Mark once adequately called this solving the “waiting problem”. It was cumbersome, to say the least. It was clear that making such a request was something to be avoided. You did it when you had to, but you avoided setting up too many different kinds of requests implictly.
Nowadays, with the advent anonymous functions/lambdas in most mainstream programming languages, continuations became the new way handle these things: do_request(...).then(result -> ...) This already made this a lot easier. And even better, now we have some form of coroutines in many languages were you can just do result = await do_request(...). It even looks almost like a normal function call.
With this, programmers can just do requests one after the other. Need one thing from a server? Do one request. Need ten things from a server? Do ten requests. Of course, this is horribly wasteful: each request will incur the full overhead of http/https and a server roundtrip. In the old times, doing the request was painful, so you automatically looked for ways to avoid doing more, and bundle your asks into one request, argueable leading to a better program.
Dependencies
Before nice package-managers where a thing, handling dependencies was a huge pain. You would have to manually get, unpack, configure and install the dependency for each developer and/or consumer system. As a consequence, libraries were big and often duplicated foundational things. But it also caused developers carefully grooming their library selections.
Now with package managers, libraries have started to become small. Duplication within libraries certainly seems to have decreased, and the average library size has decreased. But this also caused developers to be much less cautious when adopting a dependency, with package managers handling thousands of dependencies that no one developer can possibly have a full understanding of. And this then leads to things like the leftpad disaster.
Better or worse?
I am pretty sure that both having nice abstractions to deal with asynchronicity and package managers are good things. But if they make certain things too easy, how can we deal with that? The only thing I can currently think of is figuratively sticking warning-labels on these things during review time, but because those things are now so easy and subtle, it is also easy to miss them.
Are there other examples were we maybe made the wrong thing too easy? Do you have any ideas how to deal with this problem?
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